A. Technical Field
The present invention pertains generally to data processing, and relates more particularly to querying in an electronic data record system.
B. Background of the Invention
Healthcare is one industry for which viewing and sharing of information are vitally important. For instance, in order to provide effective healthcare to a patient, it is essential to be able to access a trusted persistent record of that patient's medical history. However, the unification of information stored within disparate data repositories presents a difficult problem. Until recently, it has been almost impossible for different healthcare organizations and service providers to be able to view a trusted common electronic record of a person's medical history discordant terminologies with poorly developed mechanisms for sharing the data between disparate systems. This had led to access and interoperability obstacles that prevent the presentation of an integrated view of a single patient's data.
The Health Level 7 Version 3 (HL7 v3) international standard has been developed to remove some of the interoperability obstacles by providing a platform for data consolidation. HL7 v3 includes a Reference Information Model (RIM) that enforces consistency of stored and shared information across diverse domains within healthcare. HL7 v3 and RIM facilitate the collection of patient and healthcare data from disparate systems, as well as the storage of that data in a central repository without losing its meaning so that it can be shared electronically via a secure connection across different systems in diverse organizations. The HL7 v3 standard also supports a concept-based semantics terminology model to support multiple representations of healthcare concepts in the various terminologies used within the industry. Additionally, HL7 v3 specifies methods for binding terminologies to RIM structural concepts so that a standard common semantics model for data describing healthcare concepts may be developed.
One approach to removing some of the data access obstacles is to provide a healthcare information exchange platform that combines a standards-based central data repository (such as an HL7 v3 compliant central data repository) with an integrated set of services for managing and accessing the data in the central repository. The healthcare information exchange platform typically includes a query service that provides programmatic interfaces for accessing the data stored in the data repository. To enable efficient querying of the data, it would be useful to develop a robust searching mechanism that can leverage concept-based semantics, such as the semantics model specified by HL7 v3.